China

China’s internet watchdog issued new rules that govern synthetic media. Legislation from the Cyberspace Administration of China limits the use of AI to create or edit text, audio, video, images, and 3D digital renderings. The law took effect on January 10.

The ban impacts Nvidia's A100 and H100 chips, and AMD's MI250.

In Beijing, self-driving cars are rolling without a driver behind the wheel. China’s capital city authorized Pony.ai and Apollo Go, a Baidu subsidiary, to deploy self-driving taxis without a human in the driver’s seat.

China is poised to become the dominant national power in AI, new research suggests. The Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public-policy think tank, assessed which of 50 countries are best positioned to become AI powerhouses.

The hardware that runs the latest AI systems faces rising uncertainty as models grow larger and more computationally intensive. The U.S. Commerce Department sounded an alarm over bottlenecks in the availability of semiconductor chips.

Most Americans don’t understand AI, according to a new survey. Only 16 percent of adults in the United States got a passing grade on a true-or-false questionnaire of AI’s capabilities and uses.

Legislators worldwide wrote new laws — some proposed, some enacted — to rein in societal impacts of automation.What happened: Authorities at all levels ratcheted up regulatory pressure as

China moved toward a clamp down on recommendation algorithms.What’s new: China’s internet regulatory agency proposed rules that include banning algorithms that spread disinformation and threaten national security.

Chinese researchers for the first time swept a competition to develop AI systems that monitor urban traffic. Chinese universities and companies won first and second place place in all five categories of the 2021 AI City Challenge.